{"id":43766,"date":"2015-11-06T02:10:14","date_gmt":"2015-11-06T02:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43766"},"modified":"2015-11-06T02:10:42","modified_gmt":"2015-11-06T02:10:42","slug":"an-insidious-way-to-underrepresent-minorities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43766","title":{"rendered":"An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The American Prospect<\/a>
\n2015-11-05<\/p>\n

Gary D. Bass<\/a><\/strong>, Executive Director
\nBauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n

Adrien Schless-Meier<\/strong><\/a>, Program Associate
\nBauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.<\/em><\/p>\n

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority populations are in danger of losing representation in Congress as well as their share of more than $400 billion a year<\/a> in federal funds for health care, education, job training, and community development. That possibility should get anyone\u2019s attention, yet few have noticed that it will be the likely result if Congress cuts the budget for the U.S. Census Bureau to the extent it now threatens to do.<\/p>\n

The Constitution requires a decennial census<\/a> to determine congressional apportionment, and federal law relies on the numbers to allocate funds among states and localities. Historically, the census has missed large numbers of people in poverty and racial and ethnic minorities. By the 2000 and 2010 censuses, however, the national undercount had dropped to less than 2 percent, due primarily to the Census Bureau\u2019s<\/a> dogged determination to walk America\u2019s streets and knock on the doors of the roughly 100 million U.S. residents who didn\u2019t mail back their forms. Racial and ethnic minorities were still more likely to be missed than whites. But the Census Bureau could not have reduced the disparity in counting minorities without budgetary support.<\/p>\n

Now, Congress is insisting that the Census Bureau spend less preparing for and conducting the 2020 census than it did on the 2010 census, even though the U.S. population is expected to have grown by more than 25 million people by 2020. The bureau has chosen not to fight this directive, which census experts call delusional. Instead, the bureau has embarked on a high-risk strategy to save $5 billion by rolling back door-to-door canvassing and conducting a largely electronic, Internet-based census…<\/p>\n

…Adding to this uncertainty, and on top of the technology overhaul, the Census Bureau is exploring significant changes in the way it asks about race and ethnicity, which also need prior testing. The right changes could improve the quality of race and ethnicity data, but at least one approach under consideration\u2014relying on write-in responses instead of check boxes<\/strong>\u2014would do the opposite, according to civil-rights advocates…<\/p>\n

…Resolving Confusion about Race and Ethnicity<\/strong><\/p>\n

The census might be the best source of data on race and ethnicity, but it is by no means perfect, and respondents often are confused about how to identify themselves. As currently designed, the survey first asks whether the respondent is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, and then offers a series of check boxes for Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or other Hispanic origin, with a write-in box. The next question asks for the respondent\u2019s race, with check boxes for white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, seven Asian nationalities, four Pacific Islander groups, or \u201csome other race,\u201d followed by a write-in box.<\/p>\n

About 20 million people in 2010 checked the \u201csome other race\u201d box\u2014making it the third most selected race category behind white and black\u2014and the vast majority of those were Hispanic. Vargas, who serves on the Census Bureau\u2019s advisory committee examining the race and ethnicity question, summed up the challenge: \u201cOnce you\u2019ve asked, are you Hispanic, yes or no, and they answer yes, I\u2019m Mexican American, they go to the next question and are asked, so what\u2019s your race. And people are like, wait a minute, you just asked me that. I just told you I\u2019m Mexican. And the bureau would say, no, being Hispanic is an ethnicity. It\u2019s not a racial category. But they don\u2019t see themselves in the white, black, Asian, [or] Native American categories.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities The American Prospect 2015-11-05 Gary D. Bass, Executive Director Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C. Adrien Schless-Meier, Program Associate Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C. Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid. African Americans, Hispanics, and other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14646,8,26,20],"tags":[21776,17840,21775,21774,5208,2546],"class_list":["post-43766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-adrien-schless-meier","tag-american-prospect","tag-gary-bass","tag-gary-d-bass","tag-the-american-prospect","tag-u-s-census-bureau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43767,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43766\/revisions\/43767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}